CAPS, and our small part in it

Our founder, Dan Petrovic, recently published a proposal called CAPS — the Content Attribution Payment Scheme. It’s worth your time. Here’s how we read it, and where a platform like this one fits.

The problem, as we understand it

AI assistants now answer the questions people used to answer by reading. That is genuinely useful, and it isn’t going away. But it quietly broke the deal that funded the open web: creators wrote, readers visited, and that attention paid the bills. When an AI synthesises your work into an answer, the value still flows from what you made, but the visit, and the income, often never arrives.

CAPS reframes the fix. Instead of blocking the crawlers or suing the platforms, it proposes paying creators at the moment their content is actually used to ground an answer. Money flows from advertiser to AI platform to publisher. Everyone’s incentives line up: readers get relevance, creators get paid for the value they create, and the ecosystem stays alive instead of eating itself.

We find that argument convincing because it starts from respect for the people who do the work.

Why this is bigger than us

CAPS is a systemic fix. It needs AI platforms to adopt grounding-first architectures, payment rails and attribution infrastructure to mature, and a lot of parties to agree. That work is beginning, but it is the work of an industry, not one company. We are not claiming to have built it.

What we do, in our small way

monetizers.ai starts from the same belief and does one concrete thing you can use today: it connects independent creators with brand partners for direct, honest, paid partnerships.

It doesn’t depend on how AI routes traffic. It doesn’t depend on ad networks deciding your worth. You represent your sites, you set your terms, you choose the partnerships that fit, and you get paid directly for the trust you’ve built with your audience.

That is a small piece of a much larger puzzle. CAPS is about making the whole system pay creators fairly at scale. We are about giving individual creators a fair, working way to earn from their credibility right now, while that bigger plumbing gets built.

Same direction. Same belief: the value you create should reward you. We’re just doing our part of it, one partnership at a time.